Update: 2059
Peaceful Events
Large portions of the Quebecois government fell under UKA mind control early in the year, enough for the Atlantians to control Quebec’s budget, but Prime Minister Jacques Sangle stayed clean, and soon enough it turned out he had the help of AIDS to do it. In Operation Canadian Shield, the cabinet was purged of zombies, and the water mains were aggressively scrubbed for nanites. Quebec is clearly no longer a part of the System’s coalition, but it not exactly a Multinational either: despite being grateful for USACS help, Sangle saw the ruinous potential of the UKA’s newest terror weapon and declared his country’s neutrality.
(See Spotlight)
CWOH profited from armed neutrality in World War III, drilling for Arctic oil in relative peace. Its banks have become somewhat of a magnet for foreign government, companies, and individuals desperate to divest their assets from the shifting front lines.
(+1 CWOH ASP)
The United Kingdom of the Atlantic mobilized, though the conscript army it drew was relatively small, given the discombobulated state of the far-flung territories. More terrifyingly, it launched more cyber attacks, shutting down internet access across the territories of its American enemies and playing havoc with their power and communications grids.
(+30 Atlantic irregular divisions, -1 Archipelagic ASP, -1 Patagonian ASP, -1 Texan ASP, -1 Mexican ASP)
Courtesy of Havana, Victoria used huge cash store to bribe nobles and officers.
(+10 Victorian divisions)
Early in the year, Catherine put out a call to speak with Victoria about peace, and the later monarch gracefully accepted, sneaking away from her Texan handlers. Something happened at that meeting, and she came away with scars and an entirely different attitude, speechifying about how her day was over, and the Atlantic had to be unified under Catherine at all costs. This rather pulled the rug out from under the Texans.
(See Military Events)
Texas’ TRIO spy agency found some doppelgangers embedded in the military ranks. Not all of them, though, and this caused many problems when war began to rage wild in North America.
(See Military Events)
The OSI, the United Kingdom of the Atlantic’s intelligence agency, bungled a strange attempt to destroy the Panama Canal, (which somehow relied on Incan conscripts who weren’t really available for the theatre) and got several dozen of their agents captured.
The Inca raised a relatively small but well trained conscript army.
(+10 Incan irregular divisions)
The USACS banned all water not specially purified, installed comprehensive electrical backups on systems, ordered a return to physical banking, and began holding hate weeks for months on end, all in the name of stoking anger against the invaders. UKA forces in Southern Africa discovered some pro-Atlantic propaganda leaflets that they themselves assuredly did not make, implying that the USACS was doing some tests of its own social engineering.
Taking advantage of the confusion across Multinational Europe, the Kelen’s agents scoped Germany, Ukraine, and Romania into the USACS by virtue of being the only people in any of the three states that had any real anti-UKA strategies. Promises of plebiscites after World War III seemed somewhat meaningless, but the empty words hardly mattered—officials in besieged Berlin, blacked-out Bucharest and sycophantic Kiev weren’t really in a position to resist.
(The Socialist Republic of Greater Germany, Romania, Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine merged into The Union of Sydicalist African Communal States)
Propelled by unflappable worker drones and nanotech imported from the UKA, the Roman war economy pushed to the limit and kept on chugging.
(+1 Roman ASP)
The Russians purchased thousands of clones from UKA vats, and raised some high-quality conscripts.
(+10 Russian irregular divisions)
Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei scored a major diplomatic coup when Egyptian president Gahiji had either a stroke of genius or a failure of nerve and decided to pay homage to Shiraz. The merger of the world’s two premier Islamic states created nothing less than an unqualified Ummah (now with a different transliteration), true heir to the old Caliphates (though Khamenei has not yet dared to declare a descendent of Ali and claim that title). Ironically, the union rather resembled Achaemenid Persia, but not for long—the Javanese submission to Khamenei came in less than a week. The Supreme Leader pragmatically allowed substantial domestic autonomy in his new regions, named Gahiji his deputy and representative in Egypt, and expanded the Parliament and Assembly of Experts to accommodate a whole host of new delegates. There were many celebrations, but the diverse nature of the Ummah certainly provided for a moderate plummet in Khamenei’s domestic popularity…
(Iranian Umma, United Arab Republic of Egypt, Java merged into The Ummah)
(See Military Events)
Khamenei’s government declared the Greatest Jihad against the Roman science-devils and the Shaytan-serving Indians, and really pushed the idea of intersect unity in the face of outside danger, finding a long list of Sunni scholars and Shia imams to parrot the official line. All differences have certainly not been cleared up overnight, but support for the Ummah is by now popularly equated with support for Islam itself. Roman propaganda of overextend jihad periodically blasted through every form of digital media did little but goad. With its population near the billion mark, the Ummah had little problem calling up new volunteers, especially among the delighted Egyptian Islamists, though the supply of jihad-ready Muslims in Iran itself is running a little thin.
(+70 Iranian irregular divisions)
The Ummah’s power and telecommunications grid, newly hardened, were powered back up to near-normal levels through the course of the year, due to the efforts of the Supreme Leader’s First Response Unit (which is doing a depressing amount of clean-up work). Still, all the damage done (for one, the public internet, as in Siam, is still a lost cause) means that real investments are needed to get the economy growing again. On the other hand, the FRU had success in modifying the treacherous Queen’s Wrath jets into more tamper-proof Allah’s Wrath models, which was claimed as a great victory against the science-devils despite the ‘fix’ largely entailing ripping all the advanced Atlantic-designed systems out.
India raised a vast new army of land-bribed conscripts, albeit one slightly smaller than the batch of ’58. Unfortunately for enemies of Madras, mechanical augmentations have become all the rage, which probably makes up the difference.
(+70 Indian irregular divisions)
India began building irregular settlement camps along the upper stretches of the Indus and the Amu Darya, prompting a wave of migration by Hindu dependents that may one day balance out the hostile indigenous populations.
India donated five squadrons to the faction they deemed the ‘Free Cities of Somalia,’ though this did less to secure an ally and more to feed a local civil war.
(-5 Indian squadrons)
The Siamese government took steps to integrate its Chinese regions and forge positive links with Proletarian China, merging infrastructure grids, damning the Mekong, and generally offering tax breaks for anything that fostered new national cooperation. Most notably, Han families were financially encouraged to move to Siam proper, which worked to even out the distribution of population. The Free States of Siam were redeclared the Free States of Siam and Southeast Asia, an obvious if verbally unwieldly move to placate the Chinese population. Counting substantial minorities that had lived in Siam before the recent annexations, the Chinese were now a slight majority in the country, and many still seethed from the past war. Some of the more integrationist suggested that the country name be changed again to include the term Nanyang, which was rather more…Chinese than Southeast Asia, while others in the new territories formed paramilitary organizations that openly chanted their defiance for Yui Mongkut’s government, while the hugely outnumbered Siamese police and administrators are just happy that no widescale revolt has broken out yet. A propaganda campaign that ‘Uncle Li was watching’ convinced thousands of Chinese to change their name to Li, so as to better intimidate the Prime Minister-President.
(+1 Siamese ASP)
The Proletarian Chinese government bribed the Mongols with extensive redevelopment monies, and were consequently invited to enter Ulaanbaatar. Rounding out the pacification of the last rebel territories, the East Uyghurs and the Muslim Hui were given a joint administration from Beijing and the Ummah, which they accepted. Back in the homeland, dissent is fading as Chinese succumb to the joys of rations.
(+Proletarian Chinese approval rating)
The Japanese organized their conquered lands in the southern hemisphere, annexing New Guinea and setting up the puppet Proletarian Commonwealth of Oceania to handle the other populated areas. Kulak lands were seized, water supplies were carefully purified of mind-control nanites (Tokyo had learned what to look for), and Australia was largely locked down, fed Japanese propaganda and ‘rations.’
(+Proletarian Commonwealth of Oceania)
Military Events
Multinational capitals across the world stopped existing, but UKA high command was furious at the limited scope of the damage.
(See Spotlight)
(-1 Patagonian ASP, -Archipelagic approval rating, -2 Archipelagic ASP, -1 USACS ASP, -1 Japanese ASP)
The Texan Longhorns found themselves cut off in Washington with a belligerent Victoria as the southern countryside fell back under the control of Catherine, who grew her army even larger by promising slaves their freedom if they fought (and fixing the old owners up with worker clones). The Longhorns managed to flank the Atlantics and inflict heavy casualties, but certainly not enough to hold an untenable position, and so the story turned into a retreat. The Atlantics tried to use EMPs to ground the evacuation, but certainly didn’t have good enough ones to match PADTA hardening technology, resulting in something close to a clean getaway (though Victoria was lost to the goo), and so the game shifted to the Mississippi, where Queen Catherine threw hordes of freedom-hungry slaves against the rather well defended river, which only resulted in mass casualties and blown bridges. The Texans have regained some initiative by making extensive feints across the Father of the Waters, driving Catherine crazy.
(Victorian Atlantis merged into United Kingdom of the Atlantic, +20 Atlantic irregular divisions, -9 Atlantic divisions, -19 Atlantic irregular divisions, -5 Queen’s Wrath groups, -5 Texan divisions, -4 Texan Longhorn divisions, -6 Texan groups)
(See Spotlight)
The CUWA navy seized the Galapagos, threatening a quick amphibious push to Quito, but Havana’s army actually landed in force in the Guianas and quickly reclaimed the mechanized factories before any meaningful opposition could be mustered to stop them. The entire country was captured for the Multinationals and gifted to a puppet government in short order, but there the Archipelagic advance stopped.
(+1 Archipelagic ASP, +The Guianas, -1 Incan ASP)
The majority of the fighting in South America centered around the Union of Patagonia, whereby the Inca Army of Reckoning and the UKA Brazilian Army of Eternal Bliss attempted to bypass the strongest enemy positions near Paraguay by marching south through Bolivia and swinging over the Parana to take Buenos Aires (or what was left of it). Luckily for the Multinationals, the Patagonians had turned their factories to produce cheap, swarming, relatively unhackable (commands were sent on randomly shifting frequencies from hardened control centers) Wireless Aerial Strike Platforms, or wasps. Morale in the Patagonian army was terrible, and zombie infections routinely broke out, but it almost didn’t matter, because the air war was a cinch—the System’s Queen’s Wrath jets had finally met a new type of enemy, and they were horribly outnumbered to boot. Aided by some Archipelagic units, wasps bombed as far north as Quito, acted in conjunction with mobile railguns to demolish System positions, and even lent support to Popular Front Brazilian rebels, who had finally recovered their act enough to overrun much of the southern countryside (perhaps only hindered from going further by the fact their USACS advisors had to decontaminate just about every water source—the UKA was dropping mind control nanites into lakes from the skies. By the end of the year, the Inca too were in full retreat and Lima flew a Patagonian flag.
(-12 Patagonian divisions, -8 Patagonian Wasp groups, -4 Archipelagic groups, -3 Atlantic divisions, -9 Atlantic irregular divisions, -3 Atlantic groups, -8 Incan irregular divisions, -9 Incan Queen’s Wrath groups)
The PADTA fleet dueled with Atlantic squadrons across that latter’s ocean, which came out rather well for them, as Queen Catherine had wasted significant resources trying to shell the USACS coast and interacting with the Kelen’s vast littoral minefields. Still, all the fighting has rather hampered the Archipelagic ability to trade.
(-6 Texan squadrons, -4 Archipelagic squadrons, -1 Archipelagic ASP, -2 Mexican squadrons, -30 Atlantic squadrons)
The System’s Army of Fury in South Africa met the full wrath of the Kelen as an army of fanatics, including suicide bomber Tan Ni Kelen, slammed into their lines. Harassed by insane emaciated guerrillas, hard-pressed to ship supplies through contaminated South Africa, and generally unprepared for a USACS second wind, Fury melted back to the coast, shipped off what materiel could be saved and wrote the theatre off as a loss. South Africa’s financial value had been removed in 2058 anyhow. The Kelen’s finest vented their anger by bombarding the transports, setting captured clones in chicken fights, and using live samples to fine-tune Fluffy Puppy cocktails. Some of the clones were found in USACS’ own ranks—doppelganger NCOs and low-ranking officers who were found out when they committed the cardinal sin of doubting the Kelen’s whim. Very bad things happened to those ones.
(-24 USACS divisions, -17 USACS groups, -20 Atlantic divisions, -3 Atlantic squadrons, -9 Atlantic groups, +5 Atlantic conscript divisions, -5 Atlantic conscript divisions, -20 Incan divisions, -8 Incan groups)
The Army of the New Dawn, composed of UKAers and Russians, moved on Egypt, blowing the Suez and pushing almost to the south rebel lands. Nothing bar restrictive marching orders hindered their advance. The Islamists certainly couldn’t.
(-1 Atlantic division, +20 Ummah irregular divisions, -17 Ummah irregular divisions, -2 Ummah ASP)
With the announcement of the Ummah, many Christian and secular groups happy under Gahiji’s socialist rule began feeling that the state had become incompatible with their interests. While the Copts and skeptical army officers mostly kept their heads down (it was wartime, after all), South Sudanese Christians raised the flag of revolt, while royalist Ethiopian insurgents took advantage of the chaos to emerge from their hideouts, overrunning their homeland and installing their young emperor on his throne in Addis Abba. Faced with World War III, Khamenei simply has no troops to deal with the upstarts.
Somalia was declared an autonomous zone of the USACS; the most high-ranking pirates turned into collaborators when threatened by the Kelen. Still, raider leaders were deeply divided. Most were ex-Ethiopian navy officers commanding their own ships, and had a good sense of honor. There were India-supporters, of the Free Cities movement, who figured that Madras was the best chance of regaining true independence, there were collaborators who admired socialism, there were diehard royalists who would brook no course of action but immediate pledges of fealty to the rebel empire in Addis Abba, and, most importantly, there were the Somalis themselves, who had played second fiddle to the established Amharic and Tigrean personages up until the moment when Khamenei had declared the Ummah. This last faction tried to sweep the ports of the bickering sea captains, who were forced to turn their guns on the locals. The ongoing and inconclusive civil war would be trivial if it was not tying up a huge fleet.
(+5 Ummah irregular divisions)
AIDS agents masquerading as or allied with Iberia refugees helped launch an officer’s coup in Helsinki via Operation Norse Wind. The zombified parliament was arrested, the words of the Kelen blared from digital screens to the tune of Tchaikovsky, water mains were aggressively purified, etc, etc. There were extensive defections among the more brain controlled sections of the military, which pledged outright to Queen Catherine and Prime Minister Blacktyde, and brought with them Iceland, the German front, and parts of Norway, but the Army of Sorrow, supposedly the Atlantic trump card in Europe, had ceased to exist as a coherent unit.
(+15 Atlantic divisions, +13 Atlantic squadrons, +13 Atlantic groups, +10 Atlantic Queen’s Wrath groups, -17 Balt divisions, -13 Balt squadrons, -13 Balt groups, -10 Balt Queen’s Wrath groups)
Europe became rather confusing, as Rome threw some feinting forces into Germany from the south, Siam’s clandestine SEABIG hunted down doppelgangers in Central Europe, and the Russian Army of Joy tried to lurch west while the Atlantic Army of the End moved east. The free Balt air force decimated Russian positions, which shut down the pincer, but the Army of the End was fearsome even without a buddy on the other end, slagging to the Oder River, their last nut to crack on the west being heavily fortified Berlin.
(-27 USACS divisions, -13 USACS groups, -1 USACS ASP, -1 Balt division, -3 Balt groups, -13 Atlantic divisions, -3 Atlantic irregular divisions, -8 Atlantic Queen’s Wrath groups, -1 Roman division, -5 Russian divisions, -1 Russian group)
Due to a wave of reinforcements, the Ummah outnumbered Rome’s clones on Balkan land and out counted their planes in the skies, but Rome was working with better technology, which evened the playing field somewhat. In the end the real clincher was the Ummah Revolutionary Army’s defensive mentality, which allowed for a massive marine dump in Greece and the beginnings of a real pincer. The Ummah’s commanders knew what they were doing—hitting supply lines and generally causing chaos, but the Romans pushed as far as Serbia, though they were met with a Cretean rebellion for their efforts—the island has declared neutrality in World War III, and restless Bosnians and Albanians are causing some trouble behind the front lines.
(-36 Roman divisions, -3 Roman groups, -1 Queen’s Wrath group, -13 Ummah divisions, -23 Ummah irregular divisions, -5 Ummah Janissary divisions, -3 Ummah groups, -3 Allah’s Wrath groups)
The Russian conscript ‘Army of Goliath’ attacked Ummah holdings in the Caucasus and Central Asia, whipping up yet another storm of jihadists that harried and limited the advance.
(-4 Russian irregular divisions, +10 Ummah irregular divisions, -5 Ummah irregular divisions)
Substantial Atlantic naval assets— the Harbringer Fleet— pushed past the Straits of Gibraltar and concentrated in the Mediterranean, forcing the local Ummah navy back to port with heavy casualties, though before this could happen, the jihadists landed a skeleton crew of soldiers on Cyprus, who still hold out despite their isolation.
(-9 Atlantic squadrons, -2 Roman squadrons, -21 Ummah squadrons)
Despite bombardment-based support from Harbringer battleships, the few Israelis who remained to contest their homeland were largely left to fend for themselves. Black Death 2.0 ran rampant, and the Israelis had a real cure, which was the only thing that really kept them afloat—the Ummah invention of an x-ray gun that cured the nanite disease only forced into mass production a ‘cure’ that gave its adherents largely fatal cancer. Still, cancer wasn’t contagious, which limited the plague to the Levant, and the Ummah Home Army could shut themselves up in tanks and find enough suicidals to advance in the theatre anyhow. The Israeli last stand was largely in Islamic territory, and the dying Lebanese helped force them out. Haifa is their only bastion remaining.
(-6 Ummah divisions, -2 Atlantic divisions)
Supreme Leader Khamenei did not order his navy to contest the Indian Shiva’s Fist fleet’s mastery of the Arabian Sea, which really was too bad, given that with the elimination of the pirates from the equation, he would have had a real shot at securing the waves. As it was, the Indians took Socotra, landed in Hadhramaut, expanded the Muscat beachhead, and intervened mightily in the burgeoning Arabian civil war (which the official forces of the Ummah still had no ability to contest, their Home Army either dying of cancer or tied up in Israel). The Sunni Bedouin, upon declaration of Ummah, immediately switched sides, but the ex-Crusaders fought ever harder for the exact same reason. The fighting lurched into to the Hijjaz itself, where the largest Christian population lives, and Medina is at least temporarily lost to the Ummah.
(-1 Indian division, +5 Ummah irregular divisions, -3 Ummah irregular divisions, -1 Ummah ASP)
Early in 2059, the Indian army deemed Jihadist Doom made good use of the Ummah’s not-inconsiderable communications-coordination dysfunctions, driving all the way to the outskirts of Shiraz and interfering mightily with the union celebrations. Supreme Leader Khamenei adamantly refused to evacuate, which rather made things worse—the newly gargantuan Army of the Jihad was assembling for a counteroffensive, and the capital was sure to be liberated or saved, but if the former turned out to be the case, the most important person in the Muslim world was likely to be dead. But in the end the fears were for nothing—Jihadist Doom had no orders to break into the well-defended city, and soon enough stories of the half-siege were replaced in the papers by news of tremendous reverses. With significant aid from local populations, the million-man Janissary-filled Army of the Jihad pushed some units from Afghanistan to the sea, cutting off the most forward Indian divisions before they could retreat, then won a sort of desert Stalingrad at Shiraz (minus the city damage—the most important political center of the Muslim world is largely intact), finally and began a general offensive, giving Jihadist Doom a whole new meaning as officers struggled to prevent their hundreds of thousands of irregulars from routing. By the end of the year, Janissaries stood on official Indian soil. Still, the victory is nowhere near total. The Indus line, reversed, held against the onslaught, and while the Amu Darya chain of irregular training camps was captured, the ones in Pakistan are largely still in Indian hands, either encircling or being encircled by the furthest Janissary advance.
(-11 Ummah Janissary divisions, -5 Ummah groups, -16 Indian divisions, -32 Indian irregular divisions, -10 Indian groups)
The USACS’s AIDS, invested in India, stoked up a Sri Lankan rebellion to rather outstanding success, liberating the entire island out from under Madras’ very nose. Seeing the trend, the rebel leaders on the Maldives officially declared for the Ummah, despite being cut off from Shiraz by an angry fleet.
(-2 Indian divisions)
Bengal was treated to a surprise landing by Ummah troops, who appeared in such force that the local leaders declared for Shiraz. By the time the Siamese invaded in the much-overtured Operation Burbank, the people they had hoped to subsume were clearly under a separate command, and for a day there was a jurisdictional dispute while Indian bombers gleefully dumped their payloads all around. But then the matter was sorted; the Ummah would follow Siam’s lead in the war, but maintain political authority over Bengal. And so the advance began. The Siamese were quite lucky to have their Ummah auxiliaries, otherwise even Poi Son’s First Army never would have pushed the Indian Kishna’s Flames past the newly constructed Bengali Line. As it was, the Siamese got stuck maybe half of the way through their territorial objectives, but so much Fluffy Puppy chemical-biological cocktail was thrown around that more than a million Indian civilians are dead and people wear gas masks on the streets of Madras. Siamese SEABIG agents range behind the front lines, trying their best to sow doubt of the Netaji, but there is so much anger against Multinational war crimes that few civilians are buying.
(-7 Siamese divisions, -2 Ummah divisions, -1 Ummah squadron, -8 Indian divisions, -20 Indian irregular divisions, -5 Indian squadrons, -5 Indian groups, -2 Indian ASP)
Japan took Russia’s ascension into the System very personally, pounding Moscow’s Far East with an overload of Fluffy Puppy cocktails even though the cakewalk was obvious. A few squadrons were torn apart before they could evacuate, and then the Japanese and Chinese forces of the Proletarian Emperor (may he live forever in the afterlife) finally seized objectives in Kamchatka and north bank of the Amur, linked the two zones, and gazed around at the scores of towns whose mayors were sending in personal letters of surrender.
(-3 Russian squadrons)
In Sydney, Japan faced something that resembled actual resistance, and so firebombed the city until the defenders gave up. Tanzania made the mistake of quaffing at surrender, and was Fluffy Puppied into oblivion, all human life on the island extinguished. A complex invasion of New Zealand was planned, but it all turned out to be rather unnecessary. Local leaders were falling over themselves to give up—the Atlantic’s ultramodern systems had treated anyone with a computer to eyewitness video of the Tanzanian massacres. Mind control zombies did some damage in occupation, but not much— the local Atlantic masterminds had a bare minimum of supplies to work with. The last remaining System presence in the Pacific consists of scattered island outposts.
(-1 Japanese division, -1 Japanese group, -1 Proletarian Chinese division, -4 Atlantic divisions, -3 Atlantic irregular divisions, -3 Atlantic groups)
Peaceful Events
Large portions of the Quebecois government fell under UKA mind control early in the year, enough for the Atlantians to control Quebec’s budget, but Prime Minister Jacques Sangle stayed clean, and soon enough it turned out he had the help of AIDS to do it. In Operation Canadian Shield, the cabinet was purged of zombies, and the water mains were aggressively scrubbed for nanites. Quebec is clearly no longer a part of the System’s coalition, but it not exactly a Multinational either: despite being grateful for USACS help, Sangle saw the ruinous potential of the UKA’s newest terror weapon and declared his country’s neutrality.
(See Spotlight)
CWOH profited from armed neutrality in World War III, drilling for Arctic oil in relative peace. Its banks have become somewhat of a magnet for foreign government, companies, and individuals desperate to divest their assets from the shifting front lines.
(+1 CWOH ASP)
The United Kingdom of the Atlantic mobilized, though the conscript army it drew was relatively small, given the discombobulated state of the far-flung territories. More terrifyingly, it launched more cyber attacks, shutting down internet access across the territories of its American enemies and playing havoc with their power and communications grids.
(+30 Atlantic irregular divisions, -1 Archipelagic ASP, -1 Patagonian ASP, -1 Texan ASP, -1 Mexican ASP)
Courtesy of Havana, Victoria used huge cash store to bribe nobles and officers.
(+10 Victorian divisions)
Early in the year, Catherine put out a call to speak with Victoria about peace, and the later monarch gracefully accepted, sneaking away from her Texan handlers. Something happened at that meeting, and she came away with scars and an entirely different attitude, speechifying about how her day was over, and the Atlantic had to be unified under Catherine at all costs. This rather pulled the rug out from under the Texans.
(See Military Events)
Texas’ TRIO spy agency found some doppelgangers embedded in the military ranks. Not all of them, though, and this caused many problems when war began to rage wild in North America.
(See Military Events)
The OSI, the United Kingdom of the Atlantic’s intelligence agency, bungled a strange attempt to destroy the Panama Canal, (which somehow relied on Incan conscripts who weren’t really available for the theatre) and got several dozen of their agents captured.
The Inca raised a relatively small but well trained conscript army.
(+10 Incan irregular divisions)
The USACS banned all water not specially purified, installed comprehensive electrical backups on systems, ordered a return to physical banking, and began holding hate weeks for months on end, all in the name of stoking anger against the invaders. UKA forces in Southern Africa discovered some pro-Atlantic propaganda leaflets that they themselves assuredly did not make, implying that the USACS was doing some tests of its own social engineering.
Taking advantage of the confusion across Multinational Europe, the Kelen’s agents scoped Germany, Ukraine, and Romania into the USACS by virtue of being the only people in any of the three states that had any real anti-UKA strategies. Promises of plebiscites after World War III seemed somewhat meaningless, but the empty words hardly mattered—officials in besieged Berlin, blacked-out Bucharest and sycophantic Kiev weren’t really in a position to resist.
(The Socialist Republic of Greater Germany, Romania, Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine merged into The Union of Sydicalist African Communal States)
Propelled by unflappable worker drones and nanotech imported from the UKA, the Roman war economy pushed to the limit and kept on chugging.
(+1 Roman ASP)
The Russians purchased thousands of clones from UKA vats, and raised some high-quality conscripts.
(+10 Russian irregular divisions)
Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei scored a major diplomatic coup when Egyptian president Gahiji had either a stroke of genius or a failure of nerve and decided to pay homage to Shiraz. The merger of the world’s two premier Islamic states created nothing less than an unqualified Ummah (now with a different transliteration), true heir to the old Caliphates (though Khamenei has not yet dared to declare a descendent of Ali and claim that title). Ironically, the union rather resembled Achaemenid Persia, but not for long—the Javanese submission to Khamenei came in less than a week. The Supreme Leader pragmatically allowed substantial domestic autonomy in his new regions, named Gahiji his deputy and representative in Egypt, and expanded the Parliament and Assembly of Experts to accommodate a whole host of new delegates. There were many celebrations, but the diverse nature of the Ummah certainly provided for a moderate plummet in Khamenei’s domestic popularity…
(Iranian Umma, United Arab Republic of Egypt, Java merged into The Ummah)
(See Military Events)
Khamenei’s government declared the Greatest Jihad against the Roman science-devils and the Shaytan-serving Indians, and really pushed the idea of intersect unity in the face of outside danger, finding a long list of Sunni scholars and Shia imams to parrot the official line. All differences have certainly not been cleared up overnight, but support for the Ummah is by now popularly equated with support for Islam itself. Roman propaganda of overextend jihad periodically blasted through every form of digital media did little but goad. With its population near the billion mark, the Ummah had little problem calling up new volunteers, especially among the delighted Egyptian Islamists, though the supply of jihad-ready Muslims in Iran itself is running a little thin.
(+70 Iranian irregular divisions)
The Ummah’s power and telecommunications grid, newly hardened, were powered back up to near-normal levels through the course of the year, due to the efforts of the Supreme Leader’s First Response Unit (which is doing a depressing amount of clean-up work). Still, all the damage done (for one, the public internet, as in Siam, is still a lost cause) means that real investments are needed to get the economy growing again. On the other hand, the FRU had success in modifying the treacherous Queen’s Wrath jets into more tamper-proof Allah’s Wrath models, which was claimed as a great victory against the science-devils despite the ‘fix’ largely entailing ripping all the advanced Atlantic-designed systems out.
India raised a vast new army of land-bribed conscripts, albeit one slightly smaller than the batch of ’58. Unfortunately for enemies of Madras, mechanical augmentations have become all the rage, which probably makes up the difference.
(+70 Indian irregular divisions)
India began building irregular settlement camps along the upper stretches of the Indus and the Amu Darya, prompting a wave of migration by Hindu dependents that may one day balance out the hostile indigenous populations.
India donated five squadrons to the faction they deemed the ‘Free Cities of Somalia,’ though this did less to secure an ally and more to feed a local civil war.
(-5 Indian squadrons)
The Siamese government took steps to integrate its Chinese regions and forge positive links with Proletarian China, merging infrastructure grids, damning the Mekong, and generally offering tax breaks for anything that fostered new national cooperation. Most notably, Han families were financially encouraged to move to Siam proper, which worked to even out the distribution of population. The Free States of Siam were redeclared the Free States of Siam and Southeast Asia, an obvious if verbally unwieldly move to placate the Chinese population. Counting substantial minorities that had lived in Siam before the recent annexations, the Chinese were now a slight majority in the country, and many still seethed from the past war. Some of the more integrationist suggested that the country name be changed again to include the term Nanyang, which was rather more…Chinese than Southeast Asia, while others in the new territories formed paramilitary organizations that openly chanted their defiance for Yui Mongkut’s government, while the hugely outnumbered Siamese police and administrators are just happy that no widescale revolt has broken out yet. A propaganda campaign that ‘Uncle Li was watching’ convinced thousands of Chinese to change their name to Li, so as to better intimidate the Prime Minister-President.
(+1 Siamese ASP)
The Proletarian Chinese government bribed the Mongols with extensive redevelopment monies, and were consequently invited to enter Ulaanbaatar. Rounding out the pacification of the last rebel territories, the East Uyghurs and the Muslim Hui were given a joint administration from Beijing and the Ummah, which they accepted. Back in the homeland, dissent is fading as Chinese succumb to the joys of rations.
(+Proletarian Chinese approval rating)
The Japanese organized their conquered lands in the southern hemisphere, annexing New Guinea and setting up the puppet Proletarian Commonwealth of Oceania to handle the other populated areas. Kulak lands were seized, water supplies were carefully purified of mind-control nanites (Tokyo had learned what to look for), and Australia was largely locked down, fed Japanese propaganda and ‘rations.’
(+Proletarian Commonwealth of Oceania)
Military Events
Multinational capitals across the world stopped existing, but UKA high command was furious at the limited scope of the damage.
(See Spotlight)
(-1 Patagonian ASP, -Archipelagic approval rating, -2 Archipelagic ASP, -1 USACS ASP, -1 Japanese ASP)
The Texan Longhorns found themselves cut off in Washington with a belligerent Victoria as the southern countryside fell back under the control of Catherine, who grew her army even larger by promising slaves their freedom if they fought (and fixing the old owners up with worker clones). The Longhorns managed to flank the Atlantics and inflict heavy casualties, but certainly not enough to hold an untenable position, and so the story turned into a retreat. The Atlantics tried to use EMPs to ground the evacuation, but certainly didn’t have good enough ones to match PADTA hardening technology, resulting in something close to a clean getaway (though Victoria was lost to the goo), and so the game shifted to the Mississippi, where Queen Catherine threw hordes of freedom-hungry slaves against the rather well defended river, which only resulted in mass casualties and blown bridges. The Texans have regained some initiative by making extensive feints across the Father of the Waters, driving Catherine crazy.
(Victorian Atlantis merged into United Kingdom of the Atlantic, +20 Atlantic irregular divisions, -9 Atlantic divisions, -19 Atlantic irregular divisions, -5 Queen’s Wrath groups, -5 Texan divisions, -4 Texan Longhorn divisions, -6 Texan groups)
(See Spotlight)
The CUWA navy seized the Galapagos, threatening a quick amphibious push to Quito, but Havana’s army actually landed in force in the Guianas and quickly reclaimed the mechanized factories before any meaningful opposition could be mustered to stop them. The entire country was captured for the Multinationals and gifted to a puppet government in short order, but there the Archipelagic advance stopped.
(+1 Archipelagic ASP, +The Guianas, -1 Incan ASP)
The majority of the fighting in South America centered around the Union of Patagonia, whereby the Inca Army of Reckoning and the UKA Brazilian Army of Eternal Bliss attempted to bypass the strongest enemy positions near Paraguay by marching south through Bolivia and swinging over the Parana to take Buenos Aires (or what was left of it). Luckily for the Multinationals, the Patagonians had turned their factories to produce cheap, swarming, relatively unhackable (commands were sent on randomly shifting frequencies from hardened control centers) Wireless Aerial Strike Platforms, or wasps. Morale in the Patagonian army was terrible, and zombie infections routinely broke out, but it almost didn’t matter, because the air war was a cinch—the System’s Queen’s Wrath jets had finally met a new type of enemy, and they were horribly outnumbered to boot. Aided by some Archipelagic units, wasps bombed as far north as Quito, acted in conjunction with mobile railguns to demolish System positions, and even lent support to Popular Front Brazilian rebels, who had finally recovered their act enough to overrun much of the southern countryside (perhaps only hindered from going further by the fact their USACS advisors had to decontaminate just about every water source—the UKA was dropping mind control nanites into lakes from the skies. By the end of the year, the Inca too were in full retreat and Lima flew a Patagonian flag.
(-12 Patagonian divisions, -8 Patagonian Wasp groups, -4 Archipelagic groups, -3 Atlantic divisions, -9 Atlantic irregular divisions, -3 Atlantic groups, -8 Incan irregular divisions, -9 Incan Queen’s Wrath groups)
The PADTA fleet dueled with Atlantic squadrons across that latter’s ocean, which came out rather well for them, as Queen Catherine had wasted significant resources trying to shell the USACS coast and interacting with the Kelen’s vast littoral minefields. Still, all the fighting has rather hampered the Archipelagic ability to trade.
(-6 Texan squadrons, -4 Archipelagic squadrons, -1 Archipelagic ASP, -2 Mexican squadrons, -30 Atlantic squadrons)
The System’s Army of Fury in South Africa met the full wrath of the Kelen as an army of fanatics, including suicide bomber Tan Ni Kelen, slammed into their lines. Harassed by insane emaciated guerrillas, hard-pressed to ship supplies through contaminated South Africa, and generally unprepared for a USACS second wind, Fury melted back to the coast, shipped off what materiel could be saved and wrote the theatre off as a loss. South Africa’s financial value had been removed in 2058 anyhow. The Kelen’s finest vented their anger by bombarding the transports, setting captured clones in chicken fights, and using live samples to fine-tune Fluffy Puppy cocktails. Some of the clones were found in USACS’ own ranks—doppelganger NCOs and low-ranking officers who were found out when they committed the cardinal sin of doubting the Kelen’s whim. Very bad things happened to those ones.
(-24 USACS divisions, -17 USACS groups, -20 Atlantic divisions, -3 Atlantic squadrons, -9 Atlantic groups, +5 Atlantic conscript divisions, -5 Atlantic conscript divisions, -20 Incan divisions, -8 Incan groups)
The Army of the New Dawn, composed of UKAers and Russians, moved on Egypt, blowing the Suez and pushing almost to the south rebel lands. Nothing bar restrictive marching orders hindered their advance. The Islamists certainly couldn’t.
(-1 Atlantic division, +20 Ummah irregular divisions, -17 Ummah irregular divisions, -2 Ummah ASP)
With the announcement of the Ummah, many Christian and secular groups happy under Gahiji’s socialist rule began feeling that the state had become incompatible with their interests. While the Copts and skeptical army officers mostly kept their heads down (it was wartime, after all), South Sudanese Christians raised the flag of revolt, while royalist Ethiopian insurgents took advantage of the chaos to emerge from their hideouts, overrunning their homeland and installing their young emperor on his throne in Addis Abba. Faced with World War III, Khamenei simply has no troops to deal with the upstarts.
Somalia was declared an autonomous zone of the USACS; the most high-ranking pirates turned into collaborators when threatened by the Kelen. Still, raider leaders were deeply divided. Most were ex-Ethiopian navy officers commanding their own ships, and had a good sense of honor. There were India-supporters, of the Free Cities movement, who figured that Madras was the best chance of regaining true independence, there were collaborators who admired socialism, there were diehard royalists who would brook no course of action but immediate pledges of fealty to the rebel empire in Addis Abba, and, most importantly, there were the Somalis themselves, who had played second fiddle to the established Amharic and Tigrean personages up until the moment when Khamenei had declared the Ummah. This last faction tried to sweep the ports of the bickering sea captains, who were forced to turn their guns on the locals. The ongoing and inconclusive civil war would be trivial if it was not tying up a huge fleet.
(+5 Ummah irregular divisions)
AIDS agents masquerading as or allied with Iberia refugees helped launch an officer’s coup in Helsinki via Operation Norse Wind. The zombified parliament was arrested, the words of the Kelen blared from digital screens to the tune of Tchaikovsky, water mains were aggressively purified, etc, etc. There were extensive defections among the more brain controlled sections of the military, which pledged outright to Queen Catherine and Prime Minister Blacktyde, and brought with them Iceland, the German front, and parts of Norway, but the Army of Sorrow, supposedly the Atlantic trump card in Europe, had ceased to exist as a coherent unit.
(+15 Atlantic divisions, +13 Atlantic squadrons, +13 Atlantic groups, +10 Atlantic Queen’s Wrath groups, -17 Balt divisions, -13 Balt squadrons, -13 Balt groups, -10 Balt Queen’s Wrath groups)
Europe became rather confusing, as Rome threw some feinting forces into Germany from the south, Siam’s clandestine SEABIG hunted down doppelgangers in Central Europe, and the Russian Army of Joy tried to lurch west while the Atlantic Army of the End moved east. The free Balt air force decimated Russian positions, which shut down the pincer, but the Army of the End was fearsome even without a buddy on the other end, slagging to the Oder River, their last nut to crack on the west being heavily fortified Berlin.
(-27 USACS divisions, -13 USACS groups, -1 USACS ASP, -1 Balt division, -3 Balt groups, -13 Atlantic divisions, -3 Atlantic irregular divisions, -8 Atlantic Queen’s Wrath groups, -1 Roman division, -5 Russian divisions, -1 Russian group)
Due to a wave of reinforcements, the Ummah outnumbered Rome’s clones on Balkan land and out counted their planes in the skies, but Rome was working with better technology, which evened the playing field somewhat. In the end the real clincher was the Ummah Revolutionary Army’s defensive mentality, which allowed for a massive marine dump in Greece and the beginnings of a real pincer. The Ummah’s commanders knew what they were doing—hitting supply lines and generally causing chaos, but the Romans pushed as far as Serbia, though they were met with a Cretean rebellion for their efforts—the island has declared neutrality in World War III, and restless Bosnians and Albanians are causing some trouble behind the front lines.
(-36 Roman divisions, -3 Roman groups, -1 Queen’s Wrath group, -13 Ummah divisions, -23 Ummah irregular divisions, -5 Ummah Janissary divisions, -3 Ummah groups, -3 Allah’s Wrath groups)
The Russian conscript ‘Army of Goliath’ attacked Ummah holdings in the Caucasus and Central Asia, whipping up yet another storm of jihadists that harried and limited the advance.
(-4 Russian irregular divisions, +10 Ummah irregular divisions, -5 Ummah irregular divisions)
Substantial Atlantic naval assets— the Harbringer Fleet— pushed past the Straits of Gibraltar and concentrated in the Mediterranean, forcing the local Ummah navy back to port with heavy casualties, though before this could happen, the jihadists landed a skeleton crew of soldiers on Cyprus, who still hold out despite their isolation.
(-9 Atlantic squadrons, -2 Roman squadrons, -21 Ummah squadrons)
Despite bombardment-based support from Harbringer battleships, the few Israelis who remained to contest their homeland were largely left to fend for themselves. Black Death 2.0 ran rampant, and the Israelis had a real cure, which was the only thing that really kept them afloat—the Ummah invention of an x-ray gun that cured the nanite disease only forced into mass production a ‘cure’ that gave its adherents largely fatal cancer. Still, cancer wasn’t contagious, which limited the plague to the Levant, and the Ummah Home Army could shut themselves up in tanks and find enough suicidals to advance in the theatre anyhow. The Israeli last stand was largely in Islamic territory, and the dying Lebanese helped force them out. Haifa is their only bastion remaining.
(-6 Ummah divisions, -2 Atlantic divisions)
Supreme Leader Khamenei did not order his navy to contest the Indian Shiva’s Fist fleet’s mastery of the Arabian Sea, which really was too bad, given that with the elimination of the pirates from the equation, he would have had a real shot at securing the waves. As it was, the Indians took Socotra, landed in Hadhramaut, expanded the Muscat beachhead, and intervened mightily in the burgeoning Arabian civil war (which the official forces of the Ummah still had no ability to contest, their Home Army either dying of cancer or tied up in Israel). The Sunni Bedouin, upon declaration of Ummah, immediately switched sides, but the ex-Crusaders fought ever harder for the exact same reason. The fighting lurched into to the Hijjaz itself, where the largest Christian population lives, and Medina is at least temporarily lost to the Ummah.
(-1 Indian division, +5 Ummah irregular divisions, -3 Ummah irregular divisions, -1 Ummah ASP)
Early in 2059, the Indian army deemed Jihadist Doom made good use of the Ummah’s not-inconsiderable communications-coordination dysfunctions, driving all the way to the outskirts of Shiraz and interfering mightily with the union celebrations. Supreme Leader Khamenei adamantly refused to evacuate, which rather made things worse—the newly gargantuan Army of the Jihad was assembling for a counteroffensive, and the capital was sure to be liberated or saved, but if the former turned out to be the case, the most important person in the Muslim world was likely to be dead. But in the end the fears were for nothing—Jihadist Doom had no orders to break into the well-defended city, and soon enough stories of the half-siege were replaced in the papers by news of tremendous reverses. With significant aid from local populations, the million-man Janissary-filled Army of the Jihad pushed some units from Afghanistan to the sea, cutting off the most forward Indian divisions before they could retreat, then won a sort of desert Stalingrad at Shiraz (minus the city damage—the most important political center of the Muslim world is largely intact), finally and began a general offensive, giving Jihadist Doom a whole new meaning as officers struggled to prevent their hundreds of thousands of irregulars from routing. By the end of the year, Janissaries stood on official Indian soil. Still, the victory is nowhere near total. The Indus line, reversed, held against the onslaught, and while the Amu Darya chain of irregular training camps was captured, the ones in Pakistan are largely still in Indian hands, either encircling or being encircled by the furthest Janissary advance.
(-11 Ummah Janissary divisions, -5 Ummah groups, -16 Indian divisions, -32 Indian irregular divisions, -10 Indian groups)
The USACS’s AIDS, invested in India, stoked up a Sri Lankan rebellion to rather outstanding success, liberating the entire island out from under Madras’ very nose. Seeing the trend, the rebel leaders on the Maldives officially declared for the Ummah, despite being cut off from Shiraz by an angry fleet.
(-2 Indian divisions)
Bengal was treated to a surprise landing by Ummah troops, who appeared in such force that the local leaders declared for Shiraz. By the time the Siamese invaded in the much-overtured Operation Burbank, the people they had hoped to subsume were clearly under a separate command, and for a day there was a jurisdictional dispute while Indian bombers gleefully dumped their payloads all around. But then the matter was sorted; the Ummah would follow Siam’s lead in the war, but maintain political authority over Bengal. And so the advance began. The Siamese were quite lucky to have their Ummah auxiliaries, otherwise even Poi Son’s First Army never would have pushed the Indian Kishna’s Flames past the newly constructed Bengali Line. As it was, the Siamese got stuck maybe half of the way through their territorial objectives, but so much Fluffy Puppy chemical-biological cocktail was thrown around that more than a million Indian civilians are dead and people wear gas masks on the streets of Madras. Siamese SEABIG agents range behind the front lines, trying their best to sow doubt of the Netaji, but there is so much anger against Multinational war crimes that few civilians are buying.
(-7 Siamese divisions, -2 Ummah divisions, -1 Ummah squadron, -8 Indian divisions, -20 Indian irregular divisions, -5 Indian squadrons, -5 Indian groups, -2 Indian ASP)
Japan took Russia’s ascension into the System very personally, pounding Moscow’s Far East with an overload of Fluffy Puppy cocktails even though the cakewalk was obvious. A few squadrons were torn apart before they could evacuate, and then the Japanese and Chinese forces of the Proletarian Emperor (may he live forever in the afterlife) finally seized objectives in Kamchatka and north bank of the Amur, linked the two zones, and gazed around at the scores of towns whose mayors were sending in personal letters of surrender.
(-3 Russian squadrons)
In Sydney, Japan faced something that resembled actual resistance, and so firebombed the city until the defenders gave up. Tanzania made the mistake of quaffing at surrender, and was Fluffy Puppied into oblivion, all human life on the island extinguished. A complex invasion of New Zealand was planned, but it all turned out to be rather unnecessary. Local leaders were falling over themselves to give up—the Atlantic’s ultramodern systems had treated anyone with a computer to eyewitness video of the Tanzanian massacres. Mind control zombies did some damage in occupation, but not much— the local Atlantic masterminds had a bare minimum of supplies to work with. The last remaining System presence in the Pacific consists of scattered island outposts.
(-1 Japanese division, -1 Japanese group, -1 Proletarian Chinese division, -4 Atlantic divisions, -3 Atlantic irregular divisions, -3 Atlantic groups)
